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The Supernatural Life of the Believer
I had a former student complain to me recently that the problem with ‘some charismatics’ is that they see a demon behind every tree as if every event was somehow supernatural. The real problem is, of course, that every event is supernatural, at least if we are doing it right and really, even if we aren’t. But I understand the sentiment because, after all, the supernatural appears to us as vague and indistinct. Our bacon and eggs in the morning; those are real. The gentle nudge of the Holy Spirit, maybe not so much. But all of Christianity hinges on a supernatural reality that leads to another supernatural reality. After…
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What Your Metaphors Reveal About You
One of my favorite metaphors is in Alice Walker’s essay, Beauty, When the Other Dancer is the Self. In it, she writes about her blind eye resulting from a BB gun injury from one of her brothers. She charts her relationship with her blind, scarred eye, from painful adolescence to the moment when her little girl first notices it. “You have a world in your eye,“ says her daughter, carefully observing what is left of the scar tissue. All at once, her eye becomes a metaphor for the internal worlds inside Walker that have grown because of the injury. I have posted a link at the end so you can…
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Every Poem Wants to Be Jesus: Why Christians Need Art
How mysterious is the incarnation of God in man in the person of Jesus Christ! God, who is spirit, makes Himself known in the body of Jesus. Making the word flesh is, of course, the aim of every poet. The goal of art is to turn what is spirit into a poem, a painting, a dance, or a song. It is the same impulse, to turn what is ineffable into something concrete. To turn the abstract into something that can be lived within the body. The Greek word, Logos, which means the Word and the Deed, is an attempt to explain the mystery of metaphor and the nature of incarnation.…